Pre-Calculus

I’m teaching Algebra 2 this year and the other teacher and I decided that we should introduce e to our kids. The reason it’s challenging is that it’s hard to motivate in any real way. You can do compound interest, but that doesn’t do much for you in terms of highlighting how important the number is. [1] I asked on Twitter for some help, and I got a ton of amazing responses (read them all here). My mind was blown. This year, though, I didn’t have time to execute my plan that I outlined at the bottom of that post. So here’s what I did:

The core part of what I did to get the number to pop up was to use @lukeselfwalker’s Desmos activity. I like it for so many reasons, but I’ll list a few here. It starts by “building up” a more and more complicated polynomial of the form , but in a super concrete way so kids can see the polynomial for different n-values. It shows why the x-intercept travels more and more left as you increase n, so when you finally (in the class discussion) talk about what happens when n goes to infinity, you can have kids understand this is how to “build” a horizontal asymptote. It gets kid saying trying to articulate sentences like “this number is increasing, but slower and slower” (when talking about the value of the polynomial when . And they see how this polynomial gets to look more and more like an exponential function as you increase the value of n. If you want to introduce e, this is one fantastic way to do it.

A few days later, I had everyone put their stuff down and take only a calculator with them. They paired up. (If someone didn’t have a pair, it would be fine… they just sit out the first round.) On the count of three, both people say a number between 0 and 5. (I reinforce the number doesn’t have to be an integer, so it can be 4.5 or something.)Then using their calculators, they calculate their score: they take their number and raise it to their competitor’s number. The winner has the higher number. (If it’s a tie, they go again until there is a winner.)

Then the loser is done. They “tag” along with the winner and cheer them on as they find another winner to play. This goes on. By the end, you have the class divided into two groups each cheering on one person. (I learned this game this year as an ice breaker for a large group… it’s awesome. This is the best youtube video I could find showing it.)

Finally there is a class winner.

So I then went up against them.

And when we both said our numbers, I said: e.

The class groans, realizing it was all a trick and I was going to win. We did the calculations. I obviously won.

We sit down and I show them on my laptop how this works:

The red graph is my score, for any student number chosen ().
The blue graph is the student score, for any student number chosen ().

Clearly I will always win, except for if my opponent picks e.

I tell kids they can win money off of their parents by playing this game for quarters, losing a few times, and then doing a triple or nothing contest where they then play 2.718. WINNER WINNER CHICKEN DINNER!

After this, I show kids these additionally cool things (from the blogpost), saying I just learned them and don’t know why they work (yet), but that’s what makes them so intriguing to me! And more importantly, they all seem to have nothing to do with one another, but e pops up in all of them!

I re-emphasize e is a number like and I showed them this to explain that it pops up in all these places in math that seem to have nothing to do with that polynomial we saw. And that even though we don’t have time to explore e in depth, that I wanted them to get a glimpse of why it was important enough to have a mathematical constant for it, and why their calculators have built in e and ln.

That is all. I honestly really just wrote this just because I was excited by the “game” I made out of one of the properties of e and wanted to archive it so I would remember it. (And in case someone out there in the blogoversesphere might want to try it.)

UPDATE: Coconspirator in math teaching at my school, Tom James (blogs here) created the checkerboard experiment using some code. You can access the code/alter the code here. The darker the square, the more times the number for the square has been called by the random number generator. And with some updates, you can make more squares! In the future, we can give this to kids and have them figure out an approximation for e.

[1] And introducing it with compound interest means you have to assume 100% interest compounded continuously. Where are you going to get 100% interest?!?!

I remember when I first heard about Clothesline Math, I was excited by all the possibilities. And in a few conference sessions with Chris Shore, I saw there was so much more than I had even imagined that one could do with it!

It’s basically a number line, that’s all. But it’s a nice public giant number line which can get kids talking. Today I came back from spring break and before break, students learned about logarithms. However I wanted to have them recall what precisely logarithms were… so I created a quick Clothesline Math activity.

I hung a string in the classroom. I highlighted it in yellow because you can’t really see it in the photo…

I then showed them this slide – explaining the string is a number line…

I then showed them this slide, which explains what they have to do if they get two of the same number. (I brought cute little clothespins, but mini binder clips or paperclips would have worked just as well):

And then I gave them the rules of play:

I handed out the cards and let kids go. It was nice to see they didn’t get tripped up as a class on too many of them, but I got to listen to debates over a few trickier ones, which we collectively resolved at the end.

Here is a picture of some of the cards. The two on the left are average level of difficulty. The two in the middle caused my kids to pause… it took them time to think things through (they haven’t learned any log properties yet). The one on the right doesn’t belong on the number one (it is undefined) and the kid who got that card immediately knew that. Huzzah!

Here’s a picture of the numberline at the end.

And… that’s it!

I was excited to try it out as a quick review activity. And it worked perfectly for that!

(Other things of note: Mary Bourassa made a clothesline math for log properties and shares that here. The author of Give Me A Sine blog does something similar here, but has kids create the cards. I couldn’t find anything with basic log expressions — so I made ’em and am sharing them in this post. Chris Hunter has a nice tarsia puzzle that sticks with basic log expressions here, but I wanted to try out clothesline math so I didn’t use that!) But if anyone has others out there involving logs, I’d love to see them in the comments!)

These are polar graphs that students designed using Desmos. Then I printed them out on photopaper and hung them up.

This was something I wanted to do after introducing polar graphing. Why? Because one day during the polar unit, I started playing around with desmos and accidentally created:

… from something so simple …

(Now to be fair, desmos isn’t great with creating great complicated polar graphs… and it’s better to write them parametrically to get a bit more accuracy… so this is a bit of a lie of a graph in that it isn’t totally accurate… but it’s oh so pretty.) [1]

So after our unit on polar graphing, I took 10 minutes at the start of class to introduce this idea of a Polar. Graph. Contest. First I threw this image up:

I then pulled up desmos and asked my kids to shout out some polar function. I graphed it. Then I put in a slider or two. So for example, if they said , I might have added the slider . And then I started changing the sliders. Then I might have altered the function a bit more, like and we saw what happened. Then I gave everyone 7 minutes to just come up with something pretty.

It was magical.

Kids just started playing. They dug into old functions they had learned about. They got excited by what they were seeing. They gasped and turned their screens to show their friends. Some who were getting boring graphs saw the cool graphs their classmates were getting and were inspired to mix things up since they knew they could make neat things. #mathjoy in the house.

My heart was singing.

Then I showed kids a google doc which had all the info for the contest — and the link to the google form to submit their entries. There were initially two contests. Students needed to create the coolest polar graph with one equation. And students needed to create the coolest polar art using multiple equations. However, some students were animating the sliders and coming up with fun animations (like this or this… watch both for a while). So I added an optional third animated polar graph category.

I haven’t yet told my kids who the winners are. I want to just let them appreciate the work of their classmates for now.

After creating the bulletin board, I’ve seen kids look at the artwork. Kids from my class, but also kids from other grades. And what I’ve found fascinating is that so far, very few kids pick the same polar art pieces as their favorites. I expected everyone to love the same ones I do. But it just isn’t the case. I think when I announce the winners, I’ll have the class go to the board, have everyone point out a few that they like, and then I’ll make my grand pronouncement.

Student Feedback:

I asked my kids, when submitting their artwork, “This is something new I came up with this year. I want to know if you enjoyed doing it or not. No judgments if you didn’t. Y’all tend to be honest when I ask for feedback, and I appreciate it! I genuinely want to know. I also am a bit curious if you had any mathematical thought as you were playing on Desmos? You don’t have to say what thoughts you had (if any) — just if you had any.”

Every student responded positively. Some responses included:

I think this was so awesome! I love art and this felt like art to me. It is so fun when art and math intersect, I loved it!!!!!

Messing around with the graphs was actually more entertaining than I thought it would be. I spent a lot more time on this than I thought I would, and I feel like I’ll probably spend more time on this trying to find a really cool design I like (and possibly gaining a better understanding why the graphs look the way they do…).

I had so much more fun doing this than I thought I would, honestly. Once I finished my multi-equation graph, I looked at the clock on my computer and realized I had been working on it for nearly 20 minutes; it had seemed like maybe 5.

I really enjoyed doing this assignment. I felt that I learned a lot about polar through it. I didn’t think too much about math while making my graphs, however I thought about math a lot in order to observe and think about patterns I found in my graphs.

Now I want to be frank: there isn’t much “learning” that happens when kids are doing this assignment. This isn’t a way to teach polar. But it is a way to get kids to appreciate the power of polar when they are done working with polar, and what sorts of different kinds of graphs compared to the boring ol’ rectangular coordinate system. I just wanted kids to play, like I played, and get excited, like I got excited. It’s a slightly different way to appreciate the power of math, and I am good for that. Especially since it only took 10 minutes of classtime!

As an aside, I love that when I tweeted this out, a tweep said he was going to be doing this in his class after his kids learn about circles. Um, hell yeah!

[1] So there are two ways to graph polar in desmos. First is the straight up polar way, and the second is the parametric way. It turns out that the polar way is solid for most things, but it loses refinement at times. Let me show an example. If we graphed , we should get a flower with 57 petals.

And happily, if we graphed it in both polar and parametric, we get the same looking graph:

However if we zoom in a bunch, we can see that the red graph (the polar equation) is interesting and stunning, but just isn’t correct. While the zoomed in blue graph (the parametric equation) is more boring, but is technically correct.

It turns out desmos samples more points using parametrics than polar.

As a result, a few of the polar artworks my kids made aren’t “true.” Their pieces are a desmos quirk, like the red graph is above. But what a lovely desmos quirk.

In precalculus, we do a little bit with vectors. And last year and this year, I gave a basic problem to my kids. (I think I found it in some standard textbook.) What I love about this problem is that there are so many ways kids approached it. All essentially the same, but all different enough. Because my kids weren’t all doing it the same way, it has shown me that we are teaching them well. And also, it reminds me that a super basic problem can be a super rich problem.

Approach 1: Since we were in vector land, a few kids solved it like this. They found the vector from P to Q, and then set the magnitude equal to 5 and did the algebra.

Approach 2: Similarly, some students just used the distance formula that they had memorized.

I like that this kid expanded out and then later eventually factored. Because that was slightly different than how the student in approach 1 solved it (leaving as is, and then taking the square root of both sides.

Approach 3: One student found the equation of a circle of radius 5 around the point . Then they realized that they were looking for the solution to a system of equations for the circle and the line . So they substituted into the equation of the circle and solved!

Approach 4: Most students took a geometric/visual approach. They drew the point and the line . Then they drew these two triangles (seeing that the vertical distance from the point to the line was 3 and the diagonal distance from the point to the line was 5, since we want a distance of 5 away from . Then they used 3-4-5 right triangles to get the horizontal distance.

All of these were lovely. I enjoyed seeing them all together and drawing some connections among them. Most kids were awed when they saw Approach 3. And since so many students didn’t take a straight up algebraic approach, they were like “ooooh” when they saw Approach 1/2. I supposed what I most like about this is that it really highlights how circles, distance, and vectors are all essentially tied together. I mean kids should know that circles and distance are fundamentally related (but of course they don’t always remember that). But this problem connects those two concepts with something new: vectors. And that the magnitude of vectors simply being an equation involving a circle, secretly.

***

Actually, while I’m writing this, I might as well share this other problem that had a couple of approaches. This was the basic question:

Approach 1: Most students took this approach. They drew the vector, and then drew a smaller vector with unit length, and then used similarity to find this new vector (with a scale factor of .

Related to this were students who simply saw the scalar that was multiplied by the vector to be a “scale factor” that stretches/shrinks the vector by a particular factor. But why this works is because of this similar triangles argument.

Approach 2: A bunch of students used trig. They first found “the angle” and then realized that angle put on a unit circle would work! The fact that so many students saw the problem this way made me happy. I then asked what if we wanted the vector to have length 2 or 3 (instead of unit length), and they were able to answer it. We also talked about one huge deficit of this approach: you lose exactitude since they approximated the angle with their calculator. Even if they didn’t round, they wouldn’t “see” the square root of 5 pop out, when they would with the similarity argument.

Approach 3: Okay, so strangely this year, none of my students used this approach. But it is related to the similar triangles approach, and in years past, I’ve had students come up with it. So I showed it to them so they could see another approach. It’s an algebraic approach to find the scale factor.

We’ve been working on the Law of Cosines in my precalculus classes. And I am having them prove it by scaffolding up from specific triangles to more general triangles. And then with the most general triangles, students consider acute, obtuse, and right triangles.

Kids tend to struggle a bit on the first triangle, but as soon as they realize they need to draw an altitude, they see all that opens up with right triangles and are good. After that, for the rest of the concrete ones, they tend to breeze through. The place where they first stumble again is when they get to the fifth triangle, the one with the angle . They get to but then don’t go any further. But since I know I want them to get to the law of cosines, I tell them to expand and look for something nice. Sometimes I’ll give them the answer () and then say: work your work until it looks like this, with one trig function in it. From that point on, kids are in the zone.

For years, I used to teach this by giving kids waaaay too much information.

And I kinda told them what to do… Meh. I was jumping way ahead to get to the formula. We weren’t savoring the thinking to get to the formula. Now we are.

That being said, I ran across something quite beautiful. A stunning proof of the Law of Cosines (at least for acute triangles) on the site trigonography.

I love it because it looks like a proof for the Pythagorean theorem. Which is nice because the Law of Cosines is essentially a more generalized version of the Pythagoren theorem.

The area of the bottom square (the green one) is clearly the area of the top two squares (the red and blue ones) minus two green areas. Ummm…. anyone? You see the and the and , but what you also see is that you’re taking out some area (the green bits). [1]

When introducing it to my class, I showed them this image:

and said it was a proof of .

And I just said to observe. To make statements based on what they see visually…Anything and everything. And if students could, see if they could make connections to the equation (but without writing anything down). After a short while of observations, I opened this geogebra applet and played around. I showed them what happened when we made angle C a right angle.

They saw the green rectangles disappear, and how this would be a proof of the Pythagorean theorem if the blue areas and the pink areas were equal to each other. And then I squiggled and smushed the triangle about and eventually kids conjectured that the blue rectangle areas were equal, the pink rectangle areas were equal, and the green rectangle areas were equal. I told them that was true, and they were going to prove that. But before doing that, I asked them: if this was true, do you see a connection between this diagram and the law of cosines?

And kids eventually got there. They saw this argument, essentially…

…and they realized that the green rectangles were probably the thing that was being subtracted out in the law of cosines!

At this point, I gave my kids a blank paper copy of the diagram, and groups work on proving that the blue rectangle areas were equal, the pink rectangle areas were equal, and the green rectangle areas were equal. They had seen all these right triangles before, when they were looking at the diagram and making observations, so this went pretty quickly for most of them.

I love this proof of the law of cosines! Of course when I went online, I saw so many other beautiful proofs (look here, and the links at the bottom, for some). Troll the internet and be amazed! They are so elegant! This “scaling up” one might be my favorite. And here’s one that David Butler sent me (that is on the site I linked to above). And I remember proving the Pythagorean Theorem in geometry using the crossed chord theorem, and now the same argument here can be used for the law of cosines.

[1] To be clear, this diagram only works for acute triangles. I haven’t yet modified the argument to work for obtuse triangles.

So yeah, I’m teaching the law of sines and cosines, and I’m finding some awesome things. What’s totally ridiculous is that after I introduced some of it to my class, I looked back at my stuff from last year and apparently I had done the same thing. Like… I don’t remember it at all.

In any case, when I teach the Law of Sines, I tend to have kids derive it by finding the area of a triangle in three different ways.

We set these three different ways to get the area of a triangle equal to each other, and divide by to get the Law of Sines:

Now, to be clear, there are some subtleties that have to be addressed here. Like for example, this argument clearly works for acute triangles, but what about an obtuse triangle or right triangle, like:

It turns out with just a tiiiiny little bit of extra work, we can show that the Law of Sines holds. (Here’s a fun little applet you can play with for this… one important thing that can help you for the obtuse triangle proof is that .)

So… yeah. That’s a pretty traditional way to teach the Law of Sines. But did you know that the ratio that pops up with the Law of Sines has a geometric interpretation?

Like, look at this triangle. And look at the ratio of (side length)/(the sine of the angle opposite the side).

That 10.36 has a geometric meaning. Ready for it? READY? I don’t think you are, but I’m going to show it to you anyway…

Dang! HOLY MOTHERFATHER! Yuppers. That triangle has one circle that can perfectly circumscribe it. And twice the radius of that circumscribed circle is that ratio!!! Don’t believe me? Ok, I know you do, but play with this applet I made to see it happen! Maybe try to create a right triangle and see if that reminds you of something you learned in geometry?

Now this year I told my kids that . And I sent ’em up to the whiteboards and asked them to prove it. I gave some hints. Like, for example, the inscribed angle theorem. But eventually kids got it!

This is actually another proof of the Law of Sines! (To be clear, you will also have to make an argument for an obtuse triangle, which requires a tiny bit of modification. You have to see a central angle and one of the angles of the triangle are the same because they both subtend the same arc. And a right triangle.)

So I had a follow up after this… I asked kids to prove that the area of any triangle is: , where is the radius of the circumscribed circle. I asked them to prove it algebraically, and they did:

. But we know that . So let’s manipulate the rea equation to get an in it.

.

Now we have .

I asked kids to show this algebraically. They did it in various ways (all correct), similar to the argument above. However I had a student present me with a stunning geometric argument that proved this area formula. I honestly don’t know if I would have been able to come up with it. It was so stunning I had to take a photo of it. I leave this as an exercise for the reader. MWAHAHAHA.

Today a teacher in my department was struggling to understand algebraically and conceptually why:

He was on the way to making a neat Pascal’s Triangle argument. Look at that 70. That’s :

He started working backwards, and saw that 70=35+35.

But each of those 35s came from 15 and 20. So 70=(15+20)+(20+15).

And then going backwards more, we see the 15 comes from 5 and 10, and the 20 comes from 10 and 10. So 70=((5+10)+(10+10))+((10+10)+(10+5)).

And then going backwards once more, we see the 5 comes from 1 and 4, and the 10 comes from 4 and 6. So 70=(((1+4)+(4+6))+((4+6)+(4+6)))+(((6+4)+(6+4))+((6+4)+(4+1)))

In other words, 70=1*1+4*4+6*6+4*4+1*1.

By the time we make our way down from the 1-4-6-4-1 row to 70, we see that:

The first one in the 1-4-6-4-1 row just is added once when making the 70.
The first four in the 1-4-6-4-1 row is added four times when making the 70.
The six in the 1-4-6-4-1 row is added six times when making the 70.
The second four in the 1-4-6-4-1 row is added four times when making the 70.
The second one in the 1-4-6-4-1 is added just once when making the 70.

In other words: 70=1^2+4^2+6^2+4^2+1^2.

The other teacher and I realized we could generalize this. But we were left unsatisfied. It was a Pascal’s Triangle argument, but I wanted to see the answer with an understanding of combinations. I wanted something even more conceptual. So my friend and I started thinking, and he had an awesome insight. And I want to record it here so I don’t lose it! It made me so happy — little mathematical endorphins exploding in my head!

Let’s assume we have a set of 2n letters, where n letters are A and n letters are B.

Blergity blerg, let’s just keep things concrete, and have 8 letters, where 4 are As and 4 are Bs. (We can generalize later, but I want to just see this happen!) Given 4As and 4Bs, there are ways to arrange them to make different 8 letter words [1]. Great! That was the easy part.

Now we are going to construct a whole bunch of different sets of 8 letter words, in a particular way (using AAAABBBB), so that when we add up all those sets, we’re going to get all possible 8 letter arrangements of AAAABBBB.

How are we going to do this? We are going to create special of 4 letter words and concatenate them together to make 8 letter words.

Set 1: We are going to create a 4 letter word with 0As (and thus by default, 4Bs) and a 4 letter word with 4As (and thus by default, 0Bs).

How many ways can we create 4 letter words with 0As? . To be clear, this is just 1. The word is {BBBB}.

How many ways can we create 4 letter words with 4As? . To be clear, this is just 1. The word is {AAAA}.

And when we concatenate them, we are going to have eight letter words. But we know . So this is simply . And this is just 1, because the only eight letter word possible is {BBBBAAAA}.

This is a degenerate case, so it’s hard to really see what’s going on here. So let’s move on.

Set 2: We are going to create a 4 letter word with 1A (and thus by default, 3Bs) and a 4 letter word with 3As (and thus by default, 1Bs).

How many ways can we create 4 letter words with 1As? . To be clear, this is just 4. The words are {ABBB, BABB, BBAB, BBBA}.

How many ways can we create 4 letter words with 3As? . To be clear, this is just 4. The words are {AAAB, AABA, ABAA, BAAA}.

And when we concatenate them, we are going to have eight letter words. But we know . So this is simply . And this is 16 eight letter words. (Each of the first four letter words can be paired with each of the second four letter words… so this is merely 4*4. Just to be clear, I’ll list the first few eight letter words out: ABBBAAAB, ABBBAABA, ABBBABAA, ABBBBAAA, BABBAAAB, BABBAABA, …

Set 3: We are going to create a 4 letter word with 2As (and thus by default, 2Bs) and a 4 letter word with 2As (and thus by default, 2Bs).

How many ways can we create 4 letter words with 2As? . To be clear, this is just 6. The words are {AABB, ABAB, ABBA, BAAB, BABA, BBAA}.

How many ways can we create 4 letter words with 2As? . To be clear, this is just 6. The words are {AABB, ABAB, ABBA, BAAB, BABA, BBAA}.

And when we concatenate them, we are going to have eight letter words. And this is 36. (Each of the first four letter words can be paired with each of the second four letter words… so 6*6 eight letter words.)

Set 4: We are going to create a 4 letter word with 3As (and thus by default, 1B) and a 4 letter word with 1As (and thus by default, 3Bs). By the same logic as above, we are going to end up with eight letter words. This is just 4*4 eight letter words.

Set 5: We are going to create a 4 letter word with 4As (and thus by default, 0Bs) and a 4 letter word with 0As (and thus by default, 1B). By the same logic as above, we are going to end up with eight letter words. This is just 1*1 eight letter words.

Now look at all the different eight letter words created by this process, from Set 1, Set 2, Set 3, Set 4, and Set 5. We have captured every single possible eight letter word with four As and four Bs. Let’s check a few random words:

AABABBAB… okay this is in Set 4.
BAABAABB… okay this is in Set 3.
BBBABAAA… okay this is in Set 2.

Cool! I only have to look at the first four letters to decide which set it is going to be in!

But look at what we’ve done. We’ve shown that we can get all eight letter words in these five sets… so the number of eight letter words is:

If we simply write the squares out…

But we saw at the very start that the number of eight letter words is simply

So the two are equal.

All the hard work is done, so I leave it as an exercise to the reader to generalize.

P.S. I take no credit for this amazingly wonderful letter rearrangement solution. I just bore witness as my friend figured it out, and I got giddier and giddier. I love it because it’s abstract, but still understandable to me. But it’s close to my threshhold of abstraction!

[1] If you don’t quite see this, imagine 8 blank slots.

___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___

You choose four of them to put the As into. There are ways to choose four of these slots. Put As into those four. By default the rest of the slots must be filled with Bs — they are forced! So there are ways to create eight letter words with four As and four Bs.